South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas was always going to win last Saturday’s state election, so many die-hard political junkies didn’t bother to stay up for his speech. Those who did were greeted with the curious spectacle of ‘Mali’ as he is affectionately known in SA, quoting a little-known poem by Henry Lawson called ‘The Duty of Australians’.

Poetry is not particularly popular with Australians. Even Lawson, the first poet to be honoured with a state funeral, wrote in the poem above that Australians are great to ‘men who kick or bat the ball’, ‘while we send our own, embittered [poets like him] to earn bread in foreign lands’.

The Premier invoked Lawson as a cultural touchstone, encapsulating the enduring values of ‘progressive patriotism’, in which Australians proudly wave the flag, bound by decency and the mutual obligation of mateship. This noble portrait was held up as a counter to what Malinauskas sees as the divisive, selfish, racist worldview of One Nation. The irony is that it is conservative Australians – whether they vote for One Nation, the Coalition, or Labor – who celebrate the values immortalised in the poetry of Lawson and his ilk.

To the extent that he is remembered at all by the progressive elite, Lawson is damned as a white supremacist for supporting the White Australia policy. Their cultural values were on display at the opening night party of the Sydney Biennale, on 13 March, where DJ Haram led the chants for the annihilation of Israel ‘from the river to the sea’, ‘glory to all our martyrs’, and ‘long live the resistance’, denounced ‘fascist art-washing’ and the ‘Zionist entity’ and urged the crowd to  ‘oppose the Zio-Australian-Epstein Empire’ which was complicit in an ‘ongoing genocide by Israel’.

New South Wales Labor Premier Chris Minns called the DJ’s patter ‘horrid rhetoric’ but said he would not pull NSW state funding from the Biennale. Minns argued that, ‘Getting into a cycle where we threaten to pull arts and cultural funding has the perversely opposite… effect.’ He did not want to ‘shine a spotlight on the person who’s responsible for saying it’ because it draws more attention, not less, which is why he didn’t want to use funding ‘as a cudgel’. Minns said he expected cultural and arts institutions to use taxpayer funds to represent every member of our community, and not to be a platform for hate, claiming that if they asked for funding in the future, that would be expected. It’s cold comfort for any Australians who don’t want their hard-earned taxes to fund rabid antisemitism.

In his victory speech, Malinauskas also highlighted a Vietnamese Australian he chatted with while waiting to vote, who had come to Australia as a boat person, fleeing communism and sharing the same values as the Premier’s grandparents, who fled Soviet communism in Hungary and Lithuania after the second world war.

It’s a heartwarming story, but the threat that worries conservatives (whether or not they vote for One Nation) is not, and never was, anti-communist refugees from Vietnam or anywhere else.

Malinauskas is too young to remember, but it was Labor hero Gough Whitlam, who hated Vietnamese boat people, infamously telling his immigration minister Clyde Cameron that he didn’t want what he called those ‘f–king Vietnamese Balts’ coming to Australia because it might upset relations with the country’s communist government.

What worries conservative Australians are the violent Islamists and fundamentalist Muslims. And why wouldn’t they be worried after the massacre of 15 Australians celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach and the serious injury of 50 others? Especially when Australia’s top intelligence chief, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation director-general Mike Burgess, warns that another terrorist attack in Australia continues to be more likely than not. Support for One Nation doubled after the Bondi massacre.

Just look at what happened last Friday: Prime Minister Albanese and Minister for Immigration and Home Affairs, Tony Burke, visited Lakemba mosque to join in the Eid celebrations. But if they were hoping for a handsome thank-you for recognising Palestine, they would have been disappointed. They were heckled by angry Muslims who accused them of being ‘genocide supporters’ with someone shouting, ‘How dare you come here? This is our sacred place’. A physical altercation broke out between a member of the Lebanese Muslim Association and an activist, identified as Mukhlis Mah, who is associated with Stand4Palestine, a front group for Hizb ut-Tahrir. The police were called and frogmarched the heckler out of the mosque.

Naturally, Randa Abdel-Fattah was outraged, describing the invitation to Albanese and Burke as a ‘reward for supporting the genocide and destruction of our people and homelands’. She posted on social media that ‘There is no dua [Islamic prayer] strong enough against the traitors who invited them [Albanese and Burke],’ railing that ‘The blood of Palestinians and Lebanese and Iranians is on the hands of the LMA,’ and snarling, ‘I hope your grants and selfies are worth it’, and adding that ‘There should have been an uprising in that sacred place.’

Video footage from inside the mosque showed Albanese looking visibly worried. The next day, however, from the safety of South Australia, and bathing in the reflected warmth of support for Malinauskas, Albanese thanked the Lakemba organisers for the ‘very warm reception that occurred’ and claimed that it was ‘overwhelmingly… incredibly positive’.

‘Yes’, he conceded, ‘there were a couple of people who were heckling’ because they didn’t like the government outlawing extremist organisations like Hizb ut-Tahrir, but in a crowd of 30,000, he thought, ‘that should be put in that perspective’.

That’s one way of looking at it. And if that’s your attitude, why worry about a couple of Isis sympathisers on Bondi Beach either?

On Sunday, Albanese met with the Vietnamese community. He mentioned Whitlam, but only the ending of the White Australia policy, which actually ended under Liberal prime minister Harold Holt. Like Malinauskas, Albanese took the opportunity to moralise about One Nation but to make the opposite point. Rather than looking back to Lawson’s celebration of mateship and decency, he warned, ‘We need to be vigilant. There are some, including in political life, who want to turn the clock back to an Australia that is no longer who we are.’ That’s because Malinauskas is a conservative who muses on mateship and multiculturalism; Albanese is a wannabe radical. Yet both lamely repeat the mantra that ‘diversity is our greatest strength’ and neither has a clue what to do about the Islamists in our midst.